Beautiful Redemption (9 page)

I went around to the front door. Nothing. I couldn’t even kick a foot partway through. I tried the window above the kitchen table, and the one over the sink. I tried the back windows and the side windows and even the cat door that Amma had installed for Lucille.

No luck.

Then I figured out what was going on, because I went back to the kitchen window and saw what Amma was doing. It wasn’t the
New York Times
crossword puzzle, or even
The Stars and Stripes
one. She had a needle, not a pencil, in one hand, and a square of cloth instead of paper in the other. She was doing something I’d seen her do a thousand times, and it wasn’t going to improve anyone’s vocabulary or keep anyone’s mind New York City sharp.

It had to do with keeping people’s souls safe—Gatlin County safe.

Because Amma was sewing a little bundle of ingredients into one of her infamous charm bags, the kind I had found in my drawers and beneath my mattress and sometimes even in my own pockets. Considering that I couldn’t step foot in the house, she must have been sewing them nonstop since I jumped off the water tower.

As usual, she was using her charms to protect Wate’s Landing, and there was no getting past any one of them. The salt snaking its way across the windowsill was even thicker than
usual. For the first time, there was no doubt that her crazy protections kept our house haint-free. For the first time, I noticed the strange glow of the salt, as if whatever powered it leaked into the air around the windowsills.

Great.

I was rattling the screen out back, when I caught a glimpse of the stairwell leading down to Amma’s canning pantry. I thought about the secret door at the back of that little room of storage shelves, the one that had probably been used for the Underground Railroad. I tried to remember where the tunnel came out—the one where we’d found the
Temporis Porta
, the magical door that opened into the Far Keep. Then I remembered the tunnel’s trapdoor opening to the field across Route 9. It had gotten me out of the house before; maybe it could get me in this time.

I closed my eyes and thought about that spot, as hard as I could. It didn’t work before, when I’d tried to imagine myself somewhere. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try again. My mom said that’s how it worked for her. Maybe all I had to do was picture myself somewhere hard enough, and I’d find my way there. Kind of like the ruby slippers in
The Wizard of Oz
—only without the actual slippers.

I thought about the fairgrounds.

I thought about the cigarette butts and the old weeds and the hard dirt with the imprints of long-gone carnival booths and trailer hitches.

Nothing happened.

I tried again. Still nothing.

I wasn’t sure how your average Sheer did it. Which left me ten kinds of stuck. I almost gave up and walked, figuring if I could make it out to Route 9, I could hitch a ride on the back of an unsuspecting pickup truck.

Just when it seemed impossible, I thought about Amma. I thought about wanting to get inside my house so badly I could taste it, like a whole plate of Amma’s pot roast. I thought about how much I missed her, how I wanted to hug her, take a good scolding, and untie her apron strings, like I had my entire life.

The minute those thoughts formed clearly in my mind, my feet started to buzz. I looked down, but I couldn’t see them. I felt like a seltzer tablet someone had dropped into a glass of water, like everything around me was starting to bubble and fizz.

Then I was gone.

I found myself standing in the tunnel, right across from the
Temporis Porta
. The ancient door looked as forbidding to me in death as it had in life, and I was happy to leave it behind as I made my way through the tunnel and toward Wate’s Landing. I knew where I was going, even in the dark.

I ran the whole way home.

I kept running until I shoved my way through the pantry door, up the stairs, and into the kitchen. Once I got past the
problem of the salt and the charms, the walls didn’t seem like a big deal—or feel like much of one either.

It was like walking in front of one of the Sisters’ endless slide shows, where you step in front of the projector during the hundredth photo of the cruise ship, and suddenly you look down and the ship is cruising right over you. That’s what a wall felt like. Just a projection, as unreal as a photograph from someone else’s trip to the Bahamas.

Amma didn’t look up as I approached. The floorboards didn’t squeak for the first time ever, and I thought about all the times I would’ve appreciated that—when I was trying to sneak out of that kitchen or my house, out from beneath Amma’s watchful eye. It required a miracle, and even then it usually didn’t work.

I could have used a few Sheer skills back when I was alive. Now I would give anything for someone to know I was actually here. Funny how things work out like that. Like they say, I guess you really do have to be careful what you wish for.

Then I stopped in my tracks. Actually, the smells coming from the oven stopped me.

Because the kitchen smelled like Heaven, or the way Heaven should smell—since I was thinking about it a lot more these days. The two greatest smells on earth. Pulled pork with Carolina Gold, that was one of them. I’d know Amma’s famous golden mustard barbeque sauce anywhere, not to mention the slow-cooked pork that gave up and fell to pieces at the first touch of a fork.

The other smell was chocolate. Not just chocolate, but the densest, darkest chocolate around, which meant the inside of Amma’s Tunnel of Fudge cake, my favorite of all her desserts. The one she never made for any contest or fair or family in need—just for me, on my birthday or when I got a good report card or had a rotten day.

It was my cake, like lemon meringue was Uncle Abner’s pie.

I sank into the nearest chair at the kitchen table, my head in my hands. The cake wasn’t for me to eat. It was for her to give, an offering. Something to take out to Greenbrier and leave on my grave.

The thought of that Tunnel of Fudge cake laid out on the fresh dirt by the little wooden cross made me want to throw up.

I was worse than dead.

I was one of the Greats, but a whole lot less great.

The egg timer went off, and Amma pushed back her chair, spearing the charm bag with her needle one last time and letting it drop to the table.

“Don’t want your cake to dry out now, do we, Ethan Wate?” Amma yanked open the oven door, and a blast of heat and chocolate shot out. She stuck her quilted mitts in so far I worried she was going to catch fire herself. Then she yanked out the cake with a sigh, almost hurling it onto the burner.

“Best let it cool a bit. Don’t want my boy burnin’ his mouth.”

Lucille smelled the food and came wandering into the kitchen. She leaped onto the table, just like always, getting the best vantage point possible.

When she saw me sitting there, she let out a horrible howl. Her eyes caught me in a fixed glare, as if I’d done something deeply and personally offensive.

Come on, Lucille. You and me, we go way back.

Amma looked at Lucille. “What’s that, old girl? You got somethin’ to say?”

Lucille yowled again. She was ratting me out to Amma. At first I thought she was just trying to be difficult. Then I realized she was doing me a favor.

Amma was listening. More than listening—she was scowling and looking around the room. “Who’s there?”

I looked back at Lucille and smiled, reaching out to scratch her on the top of her head. She twitched beneath my hand.

Amma swept the kitchen with her eagle eye. “Don’t you be comin’ in my house. Don’t need you spirits comin’ around. There’s nothin’ here left to take. Just a lot a broken-down old ladies and broken hearts.” She reached slowly toward the jar sitting on the counter and took hold of the One-Eyed Menace.

There it was. Her death-defying, all-powerful wooden spoon of justice. The hole in the middle looked even more like an all-seeing eye tonight. And I had no doubt it could see, maybe as well as Amma. In this state—wherever I was—I could see plain as day that the thing was strangely powerful. Like the salt, it practically glowed, leaving a trail of light where she waved it in the air. I guess things of power came in all shapes and sizes. And when it came to the One-Eyed Menace, I’d be the last one to doubt anything it could do.

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. Lucille shot me another look, hissing. Now she was getting bratty. I wanted to hiss right back at her.

Stupid cat. This is still my house, Lucille Ball.

Amma looked my way, as if she was seeing straight into my eyes. It was eerie, how close she came to knowing right where I was. She raised the spoon high above the both of us.

“Now you listen. I don’t take kindly to you stickin’ your nose inta my kitchen, uninvited. You either get outta my house, or you make yourself known, you hear? I won’t have you intrudin’ on this family. Been through nearabout enough already.”

I didn’t have much time. The smell from Amma’s charm bag was making me kind of sick, to tell the truth, and I didn’t have a whole lot of experience at haunting—if this even qualified. I was completely out of my league.

I stared at the Tunnel of Fudge cake. I didn’t want to eat it, but I knew I had to do something with it. Something to make Amma understand—just like Lena and the silver button.

The more I thought about that cake, the more I knew what I had to do.

I took a step toward Amma and her cake, ducking around the defensive spoon—and stuck my hand into the fudge, as far as I could. It wasn’t easy—it felt like I was trying to grab a handful of cement minutes before it hardened into actual pavement.

But I did it anyway.

I scooped out a big piece of chocolate cake, letting it topple off the side and slide onto the burner. I might as well have taken a bite out of it—that’s pretty much what the gaping hole in the side of the cake looked like.

One giant ghostly bite.

“No.” Amma stared, wide-eyed, holding the spoon in one hand and her apron in the other. “Ethan Wate, is that you?”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. She must have felt something, though, because she lowered the spoon and dropped into the chair across from me, letting the tears flow like a baby in the cry room at church.

Between the tears I heard it.

Just a whisper, but I heard it as clearly as if she had shouted my name.

“My boy.”

Her hands were shaking as she held on to the edge of the old table. Amma might be one of the greatest Seers in the Lowcountry, but she was still a Mortal.

I had become something else.

I moved my hand over hers, and I could have sworn she slipped her fingers between mine. She rocked in her chair a little, the way she did when she was singing a hymn she loved or was just about to finish a particularly hard crossword.

“I miss you, Ethan Wate. More than you know. Can’t bear to do my puzzles. Can’t recall how to cook a roast.” She wiped her hand across her eyes, leaving it on her forehead like she had a headache.

I miss you, too, Amma.

“Don’t go too far from home, not just yet. You hear me? I’ve a few things to tell you, one a these days.”

I won’t.

Lucille licked her paw and rolled it over her ears. She hopped down from the table and howled one last time. She started to walk out of the kitchen, stopping only to look back at me. I could hear what she was saying, as clearly as if she was speaking to me.

Well? Come on, already. You’re wasting my time, boy.

I turned and gave Amma a hug, reaching my long arms all the way around her tiny frame, as I had so many times before.

Lucille stopped and cocked her head, waiting. So I did what I’d always done when it came to that cat. I got up from the table and followed.

CHAPTER 8